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An Ideal-Principle approaches and leads Matter towards some
desired dimension, investing this non-existent underlie with a
magnitude from itself which never becomes incorporate- for
Matter, if it really incorporated magnitude, would be a mass.
Eliminate this Ideal-Form and the substratum ceases to be a thing
of magnitude, or to appear so: the mass produced by the Idea was,
let us suppose, a man or a horse; the horse-magnitude came upon
the Matter when a horse was produced upon it; when the horse
ceases to exist upon the Matter, the magnitude of the horse
departs also. If we are told that the horse implies a certain
determined bulk and that this bulk is a permanent thing, we
answer that what is permanent in this case is not the magnitude
of the horse but the magnitude of mass in general. That same
Magnitude might be fire or earth; on their disappearance their
particular magnitudes would disappear with them. Matter, then,
can never take to itself either pattern or magnitude; if it did,
it would no longer be able to turn from being fire, let us say,
into being something else; it would become and be fire once for
all.
In a word, though Matter is far extended- so vastly as to appear
co-extensive with all this sense-known Universe- yet if the
Heavens and their content came to an end, all magnitude would
simultaneously pass from Matter with, beyond a doubt, all its
other properties; it would be abandoned to its own Kind,
retaining nothing of all that which, in its own peculiar mode, it
had hitherto exhibited.
Where an entrant force can effect modification it will inevitably
leave some trace upon its withdrawal; but where there can be no
modification, nothing can be retained; light comes and goes, and
the air is as it always was.
That a thing essentially devoid of magnitude should come to a
certain size is no more astonishing than that a thing essentially
devoid of heat should become warm: Matter's essential existence
is quite separate from its existing in bulk, since, of course,
magnitude is an immaterial principle as pattern is. Besides, if
we are not to reduce Matter to nothing, it must be all things by
way of participation, and Magnitude is one of those all things.
In bodies, necessarily compounds, Magnitude though not a
determined Magnitude must be present as one of the constituents;
it is implied in the very notion of body; but Matter- not a Body-
excludes even undetermined Magnitude.
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